The trouble is not that schools don’t work; they do. They’re excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain – and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.
Kmart uses such mass production that they are able to lower their prices. My hose, for instance, is made by the same factory, the same machines, the same threads as the hose made by four top designers.
The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.
I have a suspicion that the politicians’ revival of the old behaviourist ideas and techniques will be helped and reinforced by a powerful ally – the machines we have built. The computers.
Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.
Give us detailed, testable, mechanistic accounts for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous bio macromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick and painless death.
I’m so tired of cyberpunk that says using machines to make your life better makes you less human.
Cinema halls must be preserved by us and by the government. That business is in trouble today with monumental maintenance costs of idle machines and empty seats. When the crisis of the pandemic gets over and it is safe for all of us to go back to that experience we must, in hordes.
It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA – 30 to 50 letters in length – and it’s a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are.
We are going to have to have different ethics for different artificially intelligent machines. You obviously want a different set of ethics for a military artificially intelligent machine or robot than you have for a care-taking robot.
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.
For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier – Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.
There are a lot of downsides to being male. We age faster and die younger. But give us this: we’re lifetime baby-making machines. Women’s reproductive abilities start to wane when they’re as young as 35. Men? We’re good to go pretty much till we’re dead.
There are machines that can get rid of your cellulite, so I want to do that. And my friend has just had a machine that has worked on her neck and tightened the elasticity of the skin. You just need a day off work afterwards, so I’m thinking, why not?
The big AI dreams of making machines that could someday evolve to do intelligent things like humans could – I was turned off by that. I didn’t really think that was feasible when I first joined Stanford.
That is not to say that we can relax our readiness to defend ourselves. Our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves.
We’re dumber and less cognitively nimble if we’re not around other people – and, now, other machines.
On Etsy, you can’t resell new goods you weren’t involved in making, whereas on eBay and Amazon, that is more than welcome – everything from dishwashers to XBoxes, curling irons, espresso machines, and metal detectors.
Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth – but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?
We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.
Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.
I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.
I’ve had three young children close to me – my nephew, niece and my god-daughter – born into the world needing life-saving machines to help them survive.
We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind’s collective GDP.
Looking in detail at human anatomy, I’m always left with two practically irreconcilable thoughts: our bodies are wonderful, intricate masterpieces; and then – they are cobbled-together, rag-bag, sometimes clunking machines.
The Connection Machines owned by the United States government laboratories were made available to me because they were considered impossible to program and there was no great demand for them at that time.
There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.
But I was very, very lucky, and it was a wake up call as far as motorbikes are concerned. I never flirted with death on the bike, but now I’m totally convinced they’re death machines.
People think we’re machines; they don’t realise that behind a bad run, there’s almost always a personal problem, some family issue. You have feelings; you make mistakes. You’re a person.
I’m trying to use AI to make the world a better place. To help scientists. To help us communicate more effectively with machines and collaborate with them.
Flying in space is risky. It will never be safe, and the best thing we can do is manage those risks. It’s important for people, for human beings, to be in space because they’re adaptable and because they’re not pre-programmed software that can go off and do tasks that are appropriate for machines.
Our bodies are finely tuned machines, and if our hormone mixtures aren’t ‘just right’, everything goes into disrepair.
I am so pathetic with machines in real life, it’s not a joke. I’d rather walk, or even run, than take the car out myself. I like to be driven around. Yes, I like fancy cars, and fancy bikes, too. It’s my dream to learn how to ride one myself, but for now, I am content being driven around.
People sometimes complain and it can feel like they think we want to lose. We’re not machines where one plus one is always two.
I photographed with film for many years; now that I work in digital, the difference is enormous. The quality is unbelievable: I don’t use flash, and with digital I can even work in very bad light. Also, it’s a relief not to lose photographs to x-ray machines in airports.
We are afraid of ourselves and our own unconscious minds. When we are building something that reflects us, it’s the one thing we’re all afraid to face. We’re afraid to face ourselves. Building machines that mirror our consciousness is a very frightening proposition because we have seen how evil people can be.
I personally found ‘Avatar’ – the blue people, to me, looked like painted art from the seventies. It didn’t have the realism as, say, the robotic machines.
Beyond that, states had to also have electronic voting machines that made it possible for people who are physically handicapped to vote in private… and the computerized voting machine made it very easy for, particularly, the blind.
It’s good Xerox is known for its copying machines, and it’s good Jim Carrey is known for comedy.
To be honest, I think we should find first the possibility to make it. Research is first – if you’re not interested, you never can find something. Many things happen from forgotten machines – ones that are no longer used.
I suck as a driver. I believe all cars should be piloted and driven by machines.
All these things that we’ve contemplated, whether it’s space travel or solutions to diseases that plague us, Ebola virus, all of these things would be a lot more tractable if the machines are trying to solve these problems.
‘Feminist comedy,’ practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies’ war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children.
The federal helium program sells vast amounts of the gas to U.S. companies that use it in everything from party balloons to MRI machines. If the government stops, no one else is ready.
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
Books are time machines, transporting us out of our own lives into other times and other places.
The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.
